Labor Day Independent Films

In addition to the extraordinary “Drinking Buddies,” by Joe Swanberg, and “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” by David Lowery (which are also available via video on demand), two other independent films that opened in the last few weeks are among the worthiest films on screens now: “This Is Martin Bonner” (also on V.O.D.) and “Short Term 12.” Both are in the accursed genre of social-services movies; the curse involves the too-easy eliciting of pre-programmed sympathies, and the directors of both movies—Chad Hartigan and Destin Cretton, respectively—skirt it with distinctive strategies and intentions.

“This Is Martin Bonner” is a story of mutual redemption, starring the Australian actor Paul Eenhoorn as a man at the far end of middle age whom divorce and bankruptcy compel to start over. Recently arrived in Reno, he works as a counselor to prisoners on the verge of release; a coincidence outside the prison gates brings him together with a freed convict whom he didn’t advise, Travis (Richmond Arquette). When I first saw the movie in the spring, I was deeply moved by Hartigan’s foregrounding of experience in vision—such as the reawakening of Travis’s sense of belonging by what he sees in an early-morning stroll (which Hartigan presents in a single bravura shot)—but, thinking about it now, I’m as struck by the resurgence of memory, of its pain as well as its pleasure, the sense of loss as well as the possibility of rediscovery, that the movie presents as the price, and even the definition, of a full life. Here, too, Hartigan embodies his idea with a brilliant cinematographic touch, one centered on music—and based on Eenhoorn’s real-life musical talent. What they achieve in their collaboration is too good to give away here, but it has a rare psychodramatic power. For all the movie’s quiet, deft, rapid intimacy, the effect is of a raw inner cry shaped into song.

The emphasis in Destin Cretton’s “Short Term 12,” set in and around an evaluation center for troubled teens, is on the young employees who do their best to help the facility’s residents. From the very start of the film, the robustness of character (not of a movie character but of a person’s inner productive core) is defined by the ability to tell a story—to inhabit experience fully and reproduce it, in mind and in word, with detail, nuance, and passion, and that’s exactly what Cretton (who once worked at such a center) does in the making of the movie. The focus of his movie is character itself. To test it, he relies on a potentially clichéd group of near-stock types, the diverse array enduring confinement together (it’s a war-movie trope, as in Howard Hawks’s “Sergeant York”). But Cretton transcends clichés with the highly expressive and personalized writing for the teens. In effect, he shows the young adults through their eyes to conjure the very essence of trust and confidence (or the lack thereof). The anchors of the film are the two leaders of the caregivers (played by Brie Larson and John Gallagher, Jr.). Those characters are also a couple who live together, and their romantic scenes seem to float on a vast fund of lived experience. Maybe everyone knows people, from childhood or adolescence, who are natural leaders, who inspire confidence—a variety of leadership that finds its most traditional existential test in battle but that rises to the surface wherever groups form and troubles arise—and Cretton powerfully evokes it, building it into a sense of promise, of future possibilities. It’s a movie that also begins in memory, too, but its present-tense action is constructed as memories of years to come—war stories for peaceful people.

There’s a simplicity to the filming, a sort of handmade intimacy in the work of Hartigan and Cretton that contrasts radically with studio fare. There’s no intrinsic merit to the stripped-down methods of independent filmmaking, which also have their clichés of coded sincerity. It’s as difficult to create wonders with a hand-held camera and a crew of three as with an army of crew members and trucksful of equipment. What matters, above all, is a sense of production, an original and personal approach to the people, the equipment, the schedule, and even the money, as well as to the subject itself and the ideas it conveys. Yesterday, Omar Moore tweeted—and I agree—that “Warner Brothers, Paramount, or any other Hollywood studio, wouldn’t make MALCOLM X, JFK, CHINATOWN, or THE BIG CHILL today,” and I responded with a list of recent independently produced films, such as “To the Wonder,” “Moonrise Kingdom,” “The Master,” “Red Hook Summer,” “Black Swan,” “The Social Network,” and “Somewhere,” that are as good (or even better). Independent production may free filmmakers’ hands; in posing challenges regarding the material side of production, it may also spark practical invention that familiar methods might not.

Two new films by venerable directors, Francis Ford Coppola (“Twixt”) and Brian De Palma (“Passion”) are also available on demand (De Palma’s film opens theatrically today as well), and I take no pleasure in saying that both films convey a sense of great artists who haven’t renewed their ideas or their methods. Though both films were produced independently—and both allegorize the studio tether and the dream of artistic independence—neither conveys a sense of rethinking methods, styles, or subjects to match new circumstances. Coppola seems to be frustrated with old tools but hasn’t found new ones, and De Palma, with astonishing virtuosity, deploys familiar formulas, tones, moods, and styles in ways that speak neither to the medium nor to the times nor, for that matter, even to himself.

I found myself thinking of artists from many fields who managed to be boldly self-renewing and reinventive in later years: The saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, who was among the very first jazz saxophone soloists, and who, in the nineteen-forties, hired Thelonious Monk for his first recordings, in the fifties played with Monk and John Coltrane, and, in the sixties, joined Sonny Rollins (who was then in his most radical mode of performance) for an LP of a stunningly modern freedom. Gustave Courbet, whose late seascapes of the eighteen-sixties and seventies have an almost proto-Rothko-like sense of abstraction. Igor Stravinsky, who, when over seventy, took to twelve-tone composition. Manuel de Oliveira, who is a hundred and four years old, and who, starting around age ninety, purified and aerated his style and even took to using digital effects in a strikingly original way. And, of course, Jean-Luc Godard, now eighty-two, whose every film is self-defying and self-renewing (and who has recently been working in homemade 3-D). Or, closer to home, Martin Scorsese, whose recent films, “Shutter Island” and “Hugo,” convey new extremes and innovations (I wrote here about his unusual approach to 3-D in the latter film), and, finally, Woody Allen, whose later films, such as “Cassandra’s Dream” and “To Rome with Love,” are almost blindingly audacious. These are four of the youngest filmmakers around. Their examples, and others, project a half-century and more of artistic invention and self-reinventions on the part of today’s young directors.